August 2009

August 29, 2009

In the past it's been found, in research, that women have a greater capacity for empathy than men. A new paper suggests this isn't exactly right...

The first study demonstrated that women’s advantage heldonly when women were given a task assessing their feelings ofsympathy toward the target prior to performing the empathicaccuracy task. The second study demonstrated that payments inexchange for accuracy improved the performance of both men andwomen and wiped out any difference between men’s and women’sperformances. Together, the results suggest that gender differencesin empathic accuracy performance are the result of motivationaldifferences and are not due to simple differences of abilitybetween men and women.

August 28, 2009

"An unexpected result of my research on the mafia," (the author) writes, "was
to find out that mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything" other
than shaking down legitimate businesses and enforcing trade agreements
among smaller-scale hoodlums. "Mafiosi are good at intimidation and
stick to it.... They let the professionals and the entrepreneurs take
care of the actual business operations."

Rather than getting
involved in running a restaurant or dealing drugs, they joke about
their cluelessness in such matters and simply collect payment for
"protection." But this professed incompetence (evidently quite
well-demonstrated on the rare occasions that a mafioso tries to go
legit) makes them strangely trustworthy to those using their
services: "If mobsters showed any competence at it, their clients
would fear that they might just take over."

The book's author (Diego Gambetta) goes on to argue that something similar happens in the Italian academy: the most powerful figures in this system tend to be the least intellectually distinguished.

David Brooks is back from his summer break with a column that manages to say something definitive about Ted Kennedy and also about the American way of governance, all in 600 words or whatever it is.

His point about Kennedy is that Teddy started off in the mould of his brothers: a charismatic hero who would bring change to America. This is how Americans like their presidents. Or it's how they imagine they like their presidents. After he failed at that (in 1980) Kennedy didn't just return to the sidelines and take up a comfortable purist-across-the-water position, carping at every compromise by Democrat leaders. He reinvented himself as the very essence of the principled compromiser - or as Brooks puts it, a gradualist - and a masterful deal-maker. In this way, not only did he "find himself" politically, he changed more lives for the better than most presidents. Brooks's larger point is that America's constitution is designed to reward this kind of approach. The Founders wanted Change to be hard. As the current president is finding out.

Brooks doesn't mention Obama, so I will. The kneejerk critique of Obama is that he's a charismatic hero-type who doesn't have the patience or subtlety to bring about real change. I don't think this is right. The paradoxical thing about Obama is that he's both. On the one hand he's undoubtedly charismatic and aims to be a transformative president, if such a thing is possible. On the other, he's something of a legislative nerd himself (albeit a rank amateur compared to Kennedy) who actually enjoys sweating the details of deals. After all, he's from Chicago, where every change is incremental and based on coalitions of interest. To his mind, Change will come, but it will come slowly. This health bill may get him 70% of what he wants. The rest can follow in four years. But you wait...

This is not a terribly exciting proposition and it wouldn't have made for a good campaign slogan ("Change. But In Increments!"). The issue, though, is one of expectation. His supporters, especially those on the left, don't want to wait. They believe in the president as a heroic leader, a white - or black - knight on the people's steed. They heard the call of Change and they demand it now, all of it.

Obama's biggest problem is reconciling two very different ideas of what a president is for. He needs the momentum, the friendly wind that comes from the belief that he can break the old politics. But he also needs to make the old politics work for him, and that means gradualism.

Kennedy's death, of course, is not just a personal loss to the president.

I have a boring and vague truth-lies-in-between position on the decline or otherwise of educational standards but I did enjoy Alastair Campbell's characteristically robust rejoinder to the annual cry of "dumbing-down":To those who have received good (GCSE) results, I say well done for all the
hard work you put into it, and well done to your schools and teachers
for managing to teach you well despite all the space in your lives that
goes on social networking, fads, trends, clothes, and crap telly
programmes.

And understand that the reason the media questioning of your success
increases with every rise in standards is that the vast bulk of
newspaper editors, columnists, commentators, broadcast executives and
senior broadcasters send their own kids to private schools, and their
coverage of State schools is slanted to justify their own choices.

When their kids do well, it's because they are good caring parents
and their kids are jolly bright. When you do well, it is because of
dumbing down. It is called snobbery. And nonsense.

Ted Kennedy during his 1980 campaign for president (Wally McNamee/Corbis)

Joe Klein has written a terrific sketch of Ted during the 1970s, reminding us of how long and how painful was his progress to political and personal maturity. Petrified by his brothers' legacy, ashamed of his screw-ups, Kennedy was dreadfully ill-at-ease when meeting voters, perpetually unsure whether he was going to be scorned or shot.

Sad, and funny too:

I watched him work a supermarket in New Bedford when he ran for
re-election in 1976. He accompanied a woman who was shopping for her
family. It was total agony. He simply had no idea what to say or do.
"So, uh, your family, ah, likes ... meat?" he asked. "Oh, yes,
Senator," the woman replied, and that was that. No question about the
high price of chuck. He stared at her, unable to figure out what came
next.

And a fascinating case study (via the excellent Mind Hacks) of a female patient who had the experience of changing sex when she had a seizure:The patient in question had a small tumour near the right amygdala and showed abnormal right temporal lobe activity on an EEG.
Interestingly, when she had the experience of changing sex, she also
experienced other females in the vicinity as transforming into
males.

Daniel Finkelstein writes an excellent assessment, and wonders if Kennedy's death will help Obama pass healthcare - just as LBJ was able to pass civil rights legislation in part because of the outpouring of sympathy for Kennedy's older brother.

Here's a list of the books the president has taken to Martha's Vineyard:

- The Way Home by George Pelecanos- Hot Flat and Crowded by Tom Friedman- Lush Life by Richard Price- Plainsong by Kent Haruf - John Adams by David McCullough

How does it compare with Bill's? It's pretty similar actually. They don't actually overlap. But there's a sort of quality-middlebrow feel to both, a blend of fiction and non-fiction - they could be interchangeable. It's a pity: I was hoping for something ridiculously highbrow from Obama, just to wind up the Palin tendency.

August 24, 2009

It's an exciting time for science. Not only are we on the brink of a revolution in our understanding of reproduction, but now we have new insight into the differences between men and women, courtesy of a presenter on what seems to be Saudi Arabia's equivalent of CBeebies:

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki explains in more detail something I've touched on before: Obama is in a battle with human nature as much as he is with political opposition. To continue the card-playing analogies, he's running up against our deep-rooted instincts to stick rather than twist. Surowiecki suggests an alternative communication strategy:

Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care,
while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will
actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to
preserve their current level of coverage. The message, in other words,
should be: if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.